Happy Writing About Nothing : Carol Leifer Fled the Grind of Stand-Up to Work for ‘Seinfeld’

When Carol Leifer started working for the “Seinfeld” series at the beginning of this season, she was a “Program Consultant.” Now, she’s been promoted to “Story Editor.”

Don’t tell the folks signing her checks, but the fact is, she’s a writer. As Jerry Seinfeld himself might quickly interject, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Leifer, 37, came to writing for NBC’s most popular sitcom after fleeing the world of stand-up comedy, where she had spent most of her adult life. Simply put, she tired of the endless tours of small-town Chuckle Huts, where the owners were more interested in pushing alcohol than comedy. A mere two weeks after she had privately made her decision to ditch the road, her old friends Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David called. Also veterans of the club circuit, they had more recently become very wealthy and very powerful picking through the minutiae of everyday life and calling it a TV series. They offered her a gig program-consulting, story-editing or whatever. She became the first--and only--female staff writer for the series celebrated for being about nothing.

“The way I feel about stand-up now, it’s like the fall of Saigon,” Leifer says. “People are hanging on to the chopper, you know, trying to get out. I had really lost interest--I had been doing it a long time, and to really live in my apartment now is great.”

Leifer, a New York native transplanted to L.A. two years ago, will still play the odd club date in town. Some of her material (“Playgirl magazine is not necessary--all a woman needs to do to see a naked guy is ask him; what I’d like to see is a picture of a normal guy calling me back”) would seem natural for Elaine, “Seinfeld’s” female comic foil.

In fact, Seinfeld has told interviewers that Leifer was the model for Elaine. Leifer is a tad uncomfortable with the compliment.

“It takes away what Julia-Louis Dreyfus has brought to the role,” says Leifer. “I tell people I’m the basis for Kramer.”

Seinfeld, for his part, says this about Leifer: “I, for one, would not like to imagine living in a world without Carol Leifer.”

Before “Seinfeld,” Leifer wrote briefly for Tom Arnold’s defunct “The Jackie Thomas Show.” “It’s completely different to work on a show that was struggling to come into its own with one that’s a Top 10 show,” she says.

For example, “Seinfeld’s” 11 writers (including Seinfeld) have a certain freedom that other series simply don’t enjoy--episodes have dealt with masturbation and outing. There are few language restrictions; an upcoming episode involves Elaine’s blind date exposing himself, or, as the script puts it, “Little Frank taking some air.”

“It’s become so successful that the rules for this show are different than the rules for other shows,” Leifer admits. “I think (the network) really bends over backward to accommodate Larry David with what he wants--everything’s been going so well.”

On one hand, the show’s success takes off a certain amount of stress; on the other, Leifer says it has made Seinfeld and executive producer David perhaps more demanding in order to keep the program’s quality up.

“Larry and Jerry are so attuned now that--it’s become such a well-oiled machine that you can pitch an idea to them and they know right away whether it’s gonna be an episode or not,” she says. “I came in my first day, and one of my ideas was George hires a deaf woman to read the lips of his ex-girlfriend at a party, and they both said, ‘That will be a show.’

“Another idea I pitched was that--you know how the Guardian Angels will ask for money?--I thought it would be a good George idea if he went to a Guardian Angel and said, ‘I gave you a donation, but I believe I gave you a $20 instead of a $1, and could I please have it back,’ and as he’s leaving the place, he gets mugged and nobody helps him. Larry said they had just done something like that. That can be frustrating.

“The challenge of working here is coming up with things that are small and quirky, because a lot of times you’ll pitch an idea, and the thing they say a lot is, ‘I could see that on another show.’ And they won’t do it. It’s really telling that that’s the way your idea gets turned down--’I could see that on another show.’ Larry’s always striving for something different, and that’s a unique environment in Hollywood sitcom writing.”

Leifer’s office is sparsely appointed; she doesn’t even have a computer (in fact, for such a contemporary show, all of “Seinfeld’s” writers except one pen their scripts the old-fashioned way, in longhand). Writers tend to work alone (“It’s like independent study,” she laughs). On a bulletin board Leifer’s “idea cards” are pinned up--those which David did approve of--each containing one potential subplot for an episode, which generally boasts three or four interweaving stories.

Increasingly, Leifer has turned autobiographical incidents into story ideas. “I went to see Bette Midler in December at the (Universal) Amphitheatre,” she says, “and the line for the ladies’ room, like most places you go, was incredibly long and it was so frustrating that a few women got together and said, ‘Let’s go to the men’s room,’ and since there were a few of us, it was OK and we went. But it’s created this monster in me now that if I go someplace and there’s the remotest bit of a line to the ladies’ room, I will go alone into the men’s room. And we were talking about this at work, and Larry said, ‘that’s a great Elaine story’. . . . The good thing about this job is I do a lot of things now that I normally wouldn’t do because you can usually get a story out of it.”

The next, admittedly tricky, task is to find the right mix of subplots for each episode. “The lip reader episode--from thinking of it, to it being shot, was a couple of months,” she says. “But the one I’ve been working on now (Elaine acts as a beard for a gay man at a professional function), has been three months”--she shrugs--”because there have been so many incarnations of it. I’ll write a draft, and they’ll say, ‘You need something better for the Jerry story,’ and I’ll have to go back and do it again.

“For some writers, a month is really quick, and others will linger around all season until you get it exactly right. But I like that about working on this show, because when these guys say it isn’t exactly there, I believe them, because they know what they’re doing.”

And Leifer’s longstanding relationship with Seinfeld and David remains intact.

“I was really happy they asked me to work here, but I was--when you work for a friend, it changes the dynamic,” she says. “I’ve seen it work out well and so far here, knock wood, it’s worked out great, but I’ve seen people work for each other and it destroys the friendship. And I always thought that if it happens with this job, then it wasn’t worth taking the job.”

No matter what the title.